The ten foot-tall oak has a crown of rugged branches. Its large lobed green leaves look healthy and the soil below is well-watered. The tree is planted inside a thick protective shell. Outside, it’s dark with temperatures falling -73 °C. Wind and cosmic rays cause small high-frequency vibrations, which are converted into electricity to help sustain the tree.

“This will be the first generation of trees to be planted on Martian soil,” says Samer El Sayary, an architect from Beirut, whose Tree of Life concept was one of the finalists of this year’s Mars City Design challenge. “Vibrations are the most abundant and effective way to harvest energy, instead of the traditional solar photovoltaic cells, which depend totally on only one source – the Sun.”

Unlike small-scale Mars habitation projects, Mars City Design, an LA-based think tank and eponymous yearly design competition, speculates about what Martian settlements might look like at city-scale. It also places more importance than usual on the look and feel of those settlements. “Our goal is to provide the required shelter while feeding the heart and souls of the inhabitants,” says Vera Mulyani, the think-tank’s founder and CEO.

“Most of the writing and discussion I have seen considers habitats as a purely functional piece of an engineering puzzle,” says Justin B. Hollander, director of the Tufts University Urban Attitudes Lab and advisor on the Mars One project, a non-profit with the lofty goal of establishing a settlement on the Red Planet. “I know of no other groups with such an explicit architectural interest.” The group plans to 3D-print three full-scale habitat prototypes of Martian cities in the Mojave Desert within the next three years.

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Redwood Forest City

Valentina Sumini / MIT Redwood Forest Team

This concept envisions a forest-inspired city in the middle of a Martian desert. The design will resemble the functions of an Earthly forest – transforming water and carbon dioxide into living matter and oxygen – while using the resources found on Mars to breathe life into human communities. “Our habitat will place a strong focus on recycling and using in-situ resources, especially water,” says designer Valentina Sumini. “We plan on using over 500,000 cubic meters of regolith dug for the initial root system to extract the water within.”

This article was first published in the December 2017 issue of WIRED magazine